LavenderRed_Cubabook

La Güinera, Cuba
Cross-gender performance
in workers’ dining halls
“Butterflies on the Scaffold” (“Mariposas en el andamio”), a 1995 documentary, offered
a profoundly moving account of how Cuban women construction workers literally
made room for cross-dressing performance art in the workers’ cafeterias in their
neighborhood on the outskirts of Havana, called La Güinera. The film was directed by
Margaret Gilpin and Luis Felipe Bernaza.
Gilpin reported that the preliminary cut had to be shown 11 times at the Havana
Film Festival in December 1995 to accommodate the crowds. In April 1996, the film
won the best documentary and the popularity award at the lesbian and gay film festival
in Turin.
The word “butterfly” (“mariposa”) refers to male-bodied Cubans whose femininity is
either a part or the whole of their gender expression. “Butterflies on the Scaffold” came
out at the same time that a contingent of homosexual and gender-variant Cubans danced
at the head of the massive May Day march in Havana that year. Two U.S. queer-focused
activist delegations were invited to join in the procession—one from Bay Area Queers for
Cuba, the other from New York’s Center for Cuban Studies. (Hatch and DeVries)
Cuban women—”the revolution within the revolution”—made up 70 percent of the
construction brigades that built La Güinera from the ground up.
For more than 15 years after the 1959 revolution, La Güinera remained undeveloped.
The land was in the shadow of a meat factory, surrounded by bushes and insects.
Documentary footage explained that in the beginning, before government planning
helped develop the community, “Squatters came from the provinces and formed an
association. They said, we’ll build your house today and mine tomorrow.”
A local family doctor said to the interviewer, with pride, that by the time of this documentary,
the local infant mortality rate in the neighborhood clinic. had dropped to two.
‘We saw the show and we like it’
Marisela, a young woman of African descent on the construction staff, recalled that
cross-dressing performance artists “had a show in a private house. They invited the girls
from the [workers’] dining room. We went, we saw the group, the show, and we liked it.”
How La Güinera made room for more gender 73